The shape of life: Biology's biggest mystery

IT STARTS with a single cell. From this cell can come a dizzying variety of shapes and forms, from trees to jellyfish to people. We take this process so much for granted that we forget how extraordinary it is.

So how do organisms assume their forms? One answer is that it is written in their DNA. By studying bizarre mutants such as flies with legs in place of antennae, we have identified many of the genes involved in development.

The reality, though, is that we are like a bunch of kids who have got their hands on an alien spacecraft and managed to work out roughly what the switches do by playing with them. We might be able to make it move, but we don't have a clue how it works - and we certainly couldn't fix it if it went wrong, or build another spacecraft from scratch.

Similarly, although ...

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